The Firaxis XCOM Series

Me?

iIIRC Thinman toxin only applies on an action too, a hunkered imobile unit may be imune

You're thinking of the Long War Acid version. In an unmodded game, the Thin Man Poison is a standard DoT that lasts until it's either cured of has consumed 3 HP (provided whoever is afflicted gets out of the cloud ASAP).

No, I am not talking about the ticks of damage, I for some reason rember it not procing in the first place on a hunkererd soilder in a similar place.

And I'm guessing that that's because that's how it works in Long War. If the soldier hunkers or takes no action at all, the timer ticks down without dealing damage. In unmodded, the timer will tick down and deal 1 damage at the start of every turn, regardless of what the soldier did (or didn't do). It would probably be easy to mix the two up.

EDIT: I shouldn't be talking definitely like that.

edited 22nd Jul '15 10:09:01 AM by KuroiTsubasaTenshi

From personal experience in my EW mission, I do think hunkering down stops the poison in EW too...

From tonight's session: Operation Defiant Hymn. Now that was an appropriate mission name. Hurrah! I did get a soldier wounded though, because I failed to notice my laser shot had set a bulldozer on fire.

For your game, I'd be interested in a name. Medinoc, French, British, German, male.

edited 20th Aug '15 8:49:36 AM by Medinoc

I feel like I've been too save-reload-happy with my friendslist playthrough for it to be a meaningful playthrough.

In my defense, it flat-out sucks when you've been meaning to build a dude with good aim up into a sniper and he gets killed twice, once from a car exploding for no reason (wasn't even on fire, it just exploded when it became my turn) and taking his health down enough for an alien to get him, and once again from this map where all the aliens aggro'ed at once and flanked everybody.

It feels very much like how early missions go is a function of what maps you luck into. Which is why I'm glad they're trying to fix the whole super-hard early game and super-easy late game thing for 2.

Also: what determines whether triggering one pod of aliens also triggers a second pod? It's like sometimes it results in me only engaging that pod, sometimes a bunch of other aliens will move up from Fog Of War to support.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. I usually have my poisoned soldiers hide in the back and hunker if I don't have a Medkit for them because the debuff makes their stats garbage and I want to keep them from getting finished off and like clockwork, the DoT will tick off 1 HP every turn.

This is also supported by UFOpaedia, where the Wiki for the unmodded version states nothing of the sort (this would be a crucial advantage for the Wiki to list). Additionally, the Long War Wiki specifically noting that the Acid variant not causing damage if a soldier hunker/doesn't act as a big difference in the skills.

Yeah. While all maps are technically winnable in the early game (especially with intimidate knowledge of spawn points and general patrol patterns), there are some, such as all narrow maps or either graveyard, where RNG plays a much stronger factor than with other maps.

Basically, making noise. Explosions, dashing, smashing windows and kicking open doors will cause alien patrols to divert toward the sound. There's an inversion too, where if the pod is wiped out to its last member, said member will try to move toward the closest patrolling pod. If your pursue, you'll quite likely run into this new pod.

There's also just plain bad luck as a factor. Sometimes the patrols will end up stacking on top of each other or just a move action or two away from each other, so as soon as the firefight starts, more pods will just keep wandering into the vision of the squad.

Your understanding wrong.

We are not talking about when they are already posioned.

We are saying that if they are hunkered, and a thin man explodes on them, or spews poison at them, they wont get poisoned in the first place, since it requires the unit taking an action to receive it.

They like never breathe the poison in to start with.

edited 22nd Jul '15 2:07:51 PM by Imca

Okay, well, that's most definitely false, then. I stopped explicitly hunkering down soldiers against Thin Men long ago because once their hit chance gets low enough, their chances of using the poison spit gets extremely high. So pretty much every time I hunkered a soldier behind full cover, he/she would get spit on and most definitely poisoned.

Perhaps this impression is coming from the Thin Man death ragdolling change from EU to EW? They used to just explode into poison where they died in EU, but when they die in EW, the poison leaves the body from where they impact.

Another little-known fact that might be it is that having a Medikit equipped causes poison to do jack all to a soldier—even if it's a Medikit with no charges left in it.

Weird, because I could have sworn my sniper, after having walked through a poison cloud, only took 1 damage (I know she had only the basic armor and yet wasn't hurt at the end of the mission). But on reflection, I might have confused her for my medkit-carrying support...

Or perhaps it varies depending on difficulty?

edited 22nd Jul '15 2:30:39 PM by Medinoc

Re: noise - oh, so that puts aliens on an "alert" and activates the pods within radius of the sound, and then they start patrolling instead of sitting around doing whatever it is they do for fun (because we know they're not playing...computer games)?

Medinoc: Unless you won the mission before the poison ticked more than once or cured it with the Medikit, I don't have a way to explain the Sniper taking just 1 damage (barring the confusion of which soldier was which). Poison lasts for a minimum of 3 turns (randomly to a maximum of 5, according to the Wiki, although I don't think I've seen more than 3, myself).

There's also the fact that the poison deals damage at the start of the player phase, not when the unit gets poisoned (there's still a panic check there, though).

PRC 4 Eva: Not exactly. I mean, most of the aliens, barring the scripted Council missions (where any aliens will actually just sit around; EXALT, on the other hand, isn't nearly as lazy), will already be patrolling. But they mostly meander around, likely along some set of waypoints. The noise will change their patrol route to move toward the action. If you happen to make noise somewhere and withdraw into the fog of war, though, they'll just patrol straight through wherever it happened and keep going.

If you get a chance to screw around watching the AI using Mimetic Skin, Ghost Armour or Battle Scanners, I'd recommend spending some time. It's quite interesting to see what they do and can be helpful to know for when the firefight starts.

It's also worth noting that sometimes intentionally kicking in doors and smashing windows can be a way to lure a pod into an ambush (it won't always work, though).

So how about that new Muton? There was an article attached to this, but it seems like they pulled it down. The main things from the article was that they have the same grenades and suppression ability from old Xcom, but they also now have melee attacks from their Gears of War style bayonet. Also they apparently have a chance to ignore melee attacks and immediately counter-attack, so the Ranger sword killing spree dream just died a little bit.

h ttps://downloads.2kgames.com/xcom2/blog_images/hero_muton_02.jpg

edited 22nd Jul '15 5:16:28 PM by givepass

Hm, it's kinda weird I haven't seen any other game use the chainsaw bayonet concept yet. It's been quite a while since the first Gears of War.

Chainsaw Muton article is up. Someone needs to make a 40K mod for this....

Damn, Confounding Light just came up, mere days before I was done researching Tactical Rigging. I saved the game to check, the mission disappears long before the project has a chance to be completed. This Is Gonna Suck.

Plus it's 23:30 here, so I'll get to it tomorrow.

If there's one thing that's nice about Confounding Light, it's that the terrible cover works both ways. Almost all the enemy reinforcements drop down in a place where a Squadsight Sniper perched on top of the rear subway car can hit them.

That, and the alien drop points are actually predictable. Haruhi knows I memorized them by the time I was on my Impossible Ironman EW run (some 12 playthroughs on the game on both EU and EW later). XD

edited 24th Jul '15 11:49:03 AM by MyssaRei

Yeah. Confounding Light is a little bit tricky in that regard, though, because the spawn points vary a little bit depending on where the soldiers are standing, which means that having a different class composition might make the enemies spawn in in spots one isn't expecting (the most annoying one is probably when they drop behind the big kiosks, which are the only decent hiding places from the Sniper). Oddly enough, the other two maps in that subplot don't have that same variance (in the first, they'll follow the team around, but if one takes the same route twice, the spawn positions will be the same, regardless of where the soldiers are standing).

I'm starting to find out that as much as I like Close Combat Specialist, it doesn't synergize with Mimetic Skin very well. It seems to activate and uncloak me at the absolute worst times.

I'm up to the Temple Ship, so I figure I can just keep that in mind for the next campaign. Of course, I would be finished with the Temple Ship by now, if the two Elites in the final room didn't completely bug out on me. Well, I assume it's their fault. What happened was I snuck in the final room, and everything showed up, but for some reason the Elites were completely invisible (yet I could still target them). After I start shooting, the alien turn starts, the Ethereals move, the camera focused on the place the Elites were, and... the turn just kept going.

My most recent save was just after landing on the ship, so now I have to do that whole thing again.

So, as much as I grumble about it, the Long War is the way to play XCOM. Having a blast even as frustrating as it can be.

Hoping that the Meld income/MEC prices aren't too bad. Eight separate MEC classes is about twice what I would have been happy with, would be nice to have a chance to play with them.

Would also love if XCOM 2 added an initiative system to the game. I had a hilarious moment where a thin man jumped two stories to engage my squad and got shot by all of them. Of course it would have been substantially less funny had there been any more behind him after eating seven overwatch attacks.

It's also been a while since I properly shit my pants at the sight of a UFO...near the end of June and a large something has shown up over withdrawn!France. I've never seen this wire frame model before and have no idea if it's something new to the mod or if I never engaged this class in previous run through. It's also shooting white wave beams rather than plasma bolts...uh oh...

XCOM 2 has a smarter overwatch system. Soldiers only fire at one target until it dies, any remaining soldiers on overwatch pick other targets.

Also, if you think Long War is hard Beaglerush just had a custom version made called Escalation that rebalances the game, ups the number of soldiers you can take on missions to 12 and lets the aliens act freely on their turn if you activate a pod. The intent is to make XCOM 2 a lot more like the original, and from what Beagle's played of it so far, it ups the death count very significantly.

Confounding Light and Gangplank went swimmingly despite my sniper not being colonel yet. I don't remember if I got it before the alien base assault, but I did get it in time for the XCOM base defense.

However, I had what could be my first non-tutorial casuality there: One of my support soldiers got double-teamed by the cyberdisk and mechtoid from the final wave. I also lost two base security guys.

Also I managed, so far, to keep my Argentinian heavy out of the hospital.

edited 25th Jul '15 11:51:48 AM by Medinoc

Irish: I had that same issue with Close Combat Specialist in regular EU with the Ghost Armour. It got to the point where I stopped taking the perk entirely.

Sucks about the invisibility bug. I know there used to be a bug that would cause alien command crews to effectively become invisible by teleporting into the ground (making them unreachable forever), but your issue seems to be a bit different. Still, I can't help thinking they might be related.